Debra Kaye's Blog, page 3

Use Something That Bugs You To Take The Sting Out Of Innovation

I am on a mission.  I want everyone to drink the Kool-Aid and know that his own head can be overflowing with innovative ideas.  We all have the power to design and develop thoughts into brilliant and practical innovations for everyday living.  You don’t need a test laboratory or big money.  You just need a little confidence and the right tools.

My book, Red Thread Thinking:  Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation can help guide the way.  Unlike other books that simply tell you how well known innovators developed their ideas into successful products, my book tells how you can build your own innovative ideas.  Think of it as a sourcebook for your next flash of inspiration.

Red Thread Thinking shows you how to build ideas from scratch, how to start from a blank page. To prove that your head is already brimming with ideas, there’s a short video with an example.  My little red thread and I show that just by solving an everyday problem, you can innovate.  If there is something that you don’t like, something that bugs you, chances are it irritates a whole lot of other people too.  Those people are your market and the solution is an innovation waiting to happen.

My little red thread and I give a unique solution to a problem in the video and I hope you’ll watch it, but what bugs you?  Is it that plastic packaging that’s so hard to open?  Is it that hard to grab small zipper tab on those tight skinny jeans that you struggle to pull up?  You could solve this by inventing a small piece of plastic or rope that hooks on just as a pull cord and then you remove once your pants are up.  I’d bet many would buy that because it is a lot better than breaking another nail!

My red thread is kind of smart and funny.  It has a mind of its own, as you will see in the video.  The video is very short because having an inventive mind is really just that easy.  It takes a little confidence and practice but I know that everyone has the power to be innovative.  Research shows that if you think you are smart it will just be so.  Inventiveness begets inventiveness.

Culture Is Booster Shot to Change

After years of tossing aside ancient Eastern medicine, U.S. Western medical professionals are adopting the traditional practices not only because they work (witness health insurers paying for acupuncture and fire departments and college football coaches sending their teams to yoga classes), but also because the smart practitioners understand how society has changed.  Seeing the groundswell of consumers flocking to Eastern medicine for the benefits and emotional underpinnings of its body/mind approach, Western medicine took notice.

The medical profession is understanding better the underlying emotional needs of patients and how this relates to recovery.  It’s a realization I attribute to an element of Red Thread Thinking. I call it Red Thread #3  — Consumers: The Strangest Animals in the Zoo — which holds that ideas that play into existing consumer behaviors and desires have the greatest success.  Thriving practices — in this case, physicians and insurers holding on to their patients — owe a great deal to paying close attention to cultural needs and expectations.

Today people seek wellness as an essential part of health.  Wellness encompasses a more informal network of resources, far less institutional than patients’ relationships to doctors, Western medicines, and hospitals.

This cultural shift started emerging in the 1960s and has continued to gain prominence.  It is a far broader concept than bodily health only and characterized by an emphasis on personal restoration, the maintenance of wellness, and emotional well-being.  It includes attention to body and mind, the personal and professional, both preventative and corrective care from within, and an interest in balance and strengthening of the body.

Consumers have felt a real need to “warm up” Western medicine or add essential emotional elements to self-care.  They find the right message, if not the right remedy, in herbs, supplements, teas, and open chakras. Traditional Eastern medicines and practices such as acupuncture are about bodily and emotional balance and are systems of moral discourse couched in the idiom of health and healthfulness.  Plus an emphasis on emotional objectives runs through people’s discussions of health-related products such as supplements — from simply feeling “good” to “balanced,” “strong,” “confident,” “energetic,” “up,” or “in charge.” Given this cultural wave, today’s savvy Western practitioners would ignore at their peril this emotional need of their patients.  Today’s more successful Western doctors are cross-pollinating their old, constricting, cold model with Eastern practices that restore the patient and meet the patient expectation of what healing entails.

Sometimes, following the lead of culture — or digging to look into the root drivers of behavior — will spark ideas for new models and spur innovations often predestined to be successful, because they embody the deepest desires of the culture at large. 

East meets West in medicine is but one example of harnessing the power of culture to make what is old new again in ways that capture consumer attention and market share.

Women Innovators: Where’s Your Roar?

Why is it that the vast majority of stories about inventors and creators are about men?  I know I am not alone.  I think being female has greatly contributed to helping me carve out a successful career in innovation. I certainly have an innate knowledge of the primary users of everyday household products. Women drive over 80% of the consumer economy in the United States.

According to The Female Brain by Dr. Louann Brizendine, my hippocampus is larger than that in men. This is the part of the brain that never forgets a fight, a romantic encounter or a tender moment.  An elephant-never-forgets type of memory allows me to recall experiences and observations more effectively, which is very good for seeing connections, or as I call them, Red Threads, to form new ideas.

So why is it that there are virtually no women who have written a book (other than mine due out this month) to help businesses and entrepreneurs develop ideas for innovation?  Plug the word “innovation” into Amazon and of the top 100 hits, you’ll find just two books written by women:  Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature by Janine M. Benyus and out-of-print (with no description) Innovation by Alexandra Papadakis.

It doesn’t look much better when you put “creative thinking “ into the Amazon search: women wrote only seven books out of one hundred.  Yes, that’s just 7%.  And in the advertising profession, which targets the vast majority of its communications towards women, just 3% of its creative directors are women.

Women are highly creative and inventive.  We spend our days solving problems in all sorts of unique ways; the endless balancing act among family, career and household responsibilities.  We have high executive function for both multi-tasking and extraordinary focus.  We often don’t broadcast it.  As Anna Fels wrote in a 2004 article in the Harvard Business Review and in her book Necessary Dreams:  women are totally capable of mastery, they struggle with the recognition. They don’t like to call attention to themselves.

I am a board member of the organization Count Me In.  We help women entrepreneurs grow their businesses. The single biggest obstacle to their success, which may surprise you, is the women themselves. What holds these companies back is the owner’s lack of confidence, inability to think big enough and discomfort with talking about money.  These are emotional factors that plague women and hinder our power to take hold of economic potential.  According to the Center for Women’s Business Research, there is approximately the same number of firms owned by each gender, but only 3% of women-owned companies have revenues of $1 million or more compared with 6% of men-owned businesses.

Self-esteem typically starts its decline in girls as young as nine years old and this is when the crisis of creativity for business begins.  We need to instill creative passion and confidence, and the belief that problem-solving at any level is meaningful and worth sharing.  We need to help young women get out of their own way, to push through fear and doubt.

Innovation only survives when people believe in their own ideas. Believing in your creativity or a new idea requires the ability to face fears and push ahead.  It is all about confidence and passion.  Without these qualities it is difficult to execute ideas.  Belief in yourself is what motivates you to persevere.  That’s why women aren’t out there in great enough numbers.

I know how powerful women’s ideas can be, having been privileged to work with some incredibly talented women.  Every woman’s head can be overflowing with innovative concepts.  We all have the power to design and develop thoughts into brilliant and practical innovations for everyday living. You just need a little confidence and the right tools.  Trust in your ideas and yourself.  Get out of your own way. Roar and you will be heard.

 

 

Innovation Takes Practice More Than Talent

Bill Gates, Temple Grandin, Steve Jobs, Bette Nesmith Graham (the inventor of Liquid Paper) and Art Fry (the inventor of 3M Post-It notes) – are they geniuses?  Maybe yes, or maybe not.

Innovation is open to every man, woman, and child. It requires an inquisitive mind intent on solving an existing problem. Persistence to find an answer is part of the practice. In 1873, a 15-year-old grammar school dropout named Chester Greenwood invented earmuffs. He made a fortune.

Individuals are developing meaningful, big-impact innovations by doing something as simple as looking at a common product in a new way to solve a problem. Last year, two emergency medical doctors, Dr. Richard Schwartz and Dr. John Croushorn, created an inflatable abdominal tourniquet for injuries like an aortic rupture that occur in the vulnerable torso, which military body armor does not shield and where conventional tourniquets don’t work. Their inflatable tourniquet provides time for a soldier or citizen to receive care. A once-fatal injury has lost some of its sting.

Innovation doesn’t live only in Silicon Valley or at the top tier of business management, nor does it thrive just during boom times. It doesn’t require a team meeting or a think tank, although these have their roles. It doesn’t even need an outsized talent (compared to the rest of us mere mortals) to set the spark going. It requires a nimble mind and asking the sometimes unexpected questions, like Dr. Grandin, who designed innovative cattle restraint systems by applying behavioral principals rather than additional force  — an invention that kept cattle safer and calmer.

Innovation is a skill set that can be improved with practice. You can teach your brain to better recruit its idea-producing networks and expand its ability to innovate. One research study published in the Creativity Research Journal in 2008 showed that simple, general intellectual stimulation such as being open to new ideas, taking on challenging tasks or expanding knowledge (such as learning a new language), and interacting with stimulating people and places can enhance the brain’s facility to innovate. And this is just one of many recent brain researches that indicate that much of our ability to have insights, see connections, be creative, and innovate better is governed by controllable factors.

Innovation is hard-wired in humans, perhaps because we always seek to improve. It’s part of our DNA. It will continue to drive economies, cultures, and quality of life, with new consumer conveniences, health-prolonging and life-saving devices, advances in technology, improved communications, and yes — newfangled warm headgear to get us through the winter. There are so many products, services, and ideas we have yet to even imagine that will improve both the quality and spirit of human lives.

Scanning the Big Screen Horizon

Everyone is amped up and on the lookout for the coolest new gadgets at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas, trying to pinpoint the innovation that will move the market to open its collective purse for the newest must-have. Given our culture’s communal obsession with screens, TVs have often generated the biggest buzz. Yet, this year, the flat screens remain flat. Though there have been strides taken, we’re still a few steps short of that truly revolutionary next big thing.

In the New York Times, Brian X. Chen in “As Sales Slip, TV Makers Strain for the Next Sensation” noted that television manufacturers are hoping to attract more eyeballs this year with supersized screens and quadrupled levels of detail in their images. Sony now offers an 84-inch Ultra HDTV, priced at $25,000, the Ferrari in its line that also includes “the Audi, Lexus and Mercedes side of the world,” according to Mike Lucas, a Sony senior vice president. As appealing as bigger and ultra high-definition TV might be, is it enough to incite that stop-look-touch-buy reaction that ushers in a major revenue-producing product embraced by the early adapters and then scooped up by the masses?

Not quite. Bigger and clearer misses the mark of responding to the marketplace and integrating features into products that complement what consumers are really doing in their lives. TV no longer holds viewers’ full attention; we watch two screens simultaneously now, a large-screen TV alongside our smartphone, PC/laptop, or tablet. In the course of a year, a user carries a mobile phone for longer than three times the hours spent watching TV.

Ideas or products that play into existing consumer behavior and desires have the greatest chance at success. To create a product that will truly engage the marketplace, innovators need to know what drives consumer behavior, and observing culture and understanding people is one of the necessary “red threads” that can help connect manufacturers and designers to a winning new offering.

Understanding that viewers are watching two screens at the same time, here is one big idea for the Big TV of the future: incorporate a side bar that allows viewers to search live for items or subjects they are seeing on the big screen so they don’t need their smart phones at all. Key words or links could even automatically pop up in the side bar to really get the big picture. The TV might also respond to spoken prompts, a feature that could be activated for use when it would not disturb the rest of the family who might be watching. What if a tab would report the minutes until the next commercial break, as well as how long the commercial break would last, so you could make that phone call, slip some popcorn in the microwave, or get that cup of coffee? Or let you access your calendar in a sidebar to note the date of an event you just learned about from a program or commercial? Today, TV with Internet requires users go to a different screen, losing current viewing, so TV remains in essence a screen, not quite accommodated to customer behavior.  And picture-in-picture technology could be smarter, by “judging” where the smaller inset image should be placed, to avoid blocking the viewer’s vision of the central action occurring on their larger screen.

On NPR’s “All Tech Considered,” Steve Henn said he was at the CES weighing “the ongoing effort to get your TV to play nicely with your smartphone, tablet or PC.” He reported on Nvidia’s Project Shield, a gaming portable that allows users to stream games from the device — or, when attached to a PC, access and share movies — direct to the big-screen TV in the living room. Though a glimmer in meeting the consumer where he lives today, it is basically a projection device offering a connection to a larger screen.

Bigger, higher-def TV and wireless sharing certainly will get some action and trade-up but making our favorite big screen simultaneously dual use is more 21st century and responsive to how consumers live. That could be a real business builder, and a true showstopper at a future Consumer Electronics Show.

Big Business Spends On Mass Media, While The Media Gets Personal

Have you noticed a big difference in a way brands market to you on a smartphone? Neither have we. And that’s the problem. Big business is still investing in the communication of messages using the mass mediums of television and direct marketing, but they haven’t noticed the real action is on a different screen–and it’s personal.

It has been almost 50 years since Marshall McLuhan first coined what would eventually become a cultural catchphrase, “the medium is the message” in his 1964 book,Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. He explained that technology or the medium itself affects social organization and understanding. Television, radio and film–one-way broadcast media–ushered in the mass-communication age, leaving behind what had been society’s mainstay personal, face-to-face communications for what might have been forever. But history has a way of repeating itself, and we are once again entering a new age of personal communication.

Personal communication technologies such as smartphones mean the end of mass communications as we know it, but businesses and marketers are just not heeding this huge cultural shift. In August, Google, working with market analysts Sterling Brands and Ipsos, published the results of a study, “The New Multi-Screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior.” This report puts some hard numbers to the truth that it is time to say goodbye to the mass communication age:

A mobile phone is in the possession of its user for an average of 5,840 hours per year, while the average time spent watching television is only 1,865 hours per year.
Our online time is spread over four media devices: smartphones, tablets, PCs/laptops, and television.
TV no longer commands the viewer’s full attention. Most of the time another device is also being used simultaneously.

Marketing Charts further reinforces the importance of personal communications to marketers. It highlights results from Monetate’s Ecommerce Quarterly (EQ) report for the third quarter of 2012. Based on its analysis of over 100 million online shopping experiences, Monetate reports that devices such as smart phones and tablets continue to drive more traffic to e-commerce sites.

The mass mediums themselves have noticed this enormous culture shifts and have adapted their reporting. News outlets increasingly see the personal as more interesting fodder for their stories, reporting sentiment from Twitter chatter or Facebook “likes” as news to their audiences. In a fascinating display of the emergence of the power of the social medium, CNNspeculated that a Twitter war of words might become the new norm in the news world. The Israel Defense Force struck first, sending live Tweets containing information about a strike that killed a Hamas leader with its own spin on the attack. Hamas itself responded in a separate feed. The news media then began reporting on the conflict, but the most interesting part is that CNN saw fit to report on the battling sides and their use of Twitter in presenting their message. The article concluded by observing that Twitter and Facebook are changing communications in some very fundamental ways.

Commenting on the movement from mass communication to personal communication, anthropologist Tom Maschio of Maschio Consulting said, “I see this as a real cultural shift. Social media is the real lens through which news is increasingly received, commented on, and understood. Twitter often leads the news cycle, cueing the mainstream media into what people are interested in and illuminating what their take on a particular story is. ‘News’ is being defined differently because of the game of and participation in social media. Personal news, entertainment news, popular culture news, and hard news are increasingly received, shared and commented upon via social media. Social media drives popular culture news and increasingly ‘hard news.’” Social media is even building favor in the investment world, with potential investors using the number of Facebook likes as a factor they take into consideration when making investment decisions.

What does all of this mean for big business when it comes to shaping a marketing strategy for today’s bold new world? It means they need to rethink their strategy for communicating with consumers and begin looking at it on a personal basis. To continue blasting advertisements through the mass media without taking this cultural shift into consideration is simply a huge waste of marketing dollars. For example, communication strategies need to take into account what needs to be happening on a brand’s website at the same time as it’s advertising may be appearing on television. Why? More than two-thirds of consumers are on another device at the same time they are watching TV and often for an Internet search.

Even what might be considered lesser communications need to consider the personal. It isn’t just about sending a “thank you” for signing up to mailing list but a timely response with what is happening at a particular moment in time within the brand’s own communications. Standard form, one-size-fits-all replies are history. With the emergence of social media as the dominant method of transmitting information, business needs to get personal again.

This post was originally written for and published on Fast Company. This post was co-authored with Jure KLEPIC.

 

Driving Successful Entrepreneurship: Passion, Perseverance and Persistence

When you look at the most successful entrepreneurs, you discover three overriding traits – passion, perseverance and persistence – The Three P’s. They have a deep passion for what they are doing and keep at it until they achieve their goals. This inner drive, rather than the desire to make money, is the most critical component of their success. Think of Edison, Jobs, Dell, Hewlett and Packard, who all started out simply doing something they felt compelled to do. They persisted in looking everywhere for solutions to their challenges.

If you don’t love what you are doing, your mind will never be open to the connections you can make and you will cut yourself off from simple solutions you might otherwise have uncovered. The 3 P’s help nurture, strengthen, and grow what may have been gut instinct or “a hunch” into something powerful and profound.  Passion is not blind allegiance to an idea. It’s the willingness to experiment, explore, invest energy, hit a dead end, and then chase a new direction that allows you to refine, revise, alter and grow good ideas. Doing interesting things requires effort. It’s no surprise that without passion, a drive connected to our heart, we often abandon something challenging for simpler, more predictable pursuits.

Achievement demands connecting to your personal motivations and desires to reach beyond your doubts and outside naysayers. You must recognize mistakes, make revisions, rethink and retool. Steve Jobs said, “About half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”  Passion motivates you and is essential for convincing others about your ideas. Persistence and perseverance harness that passion into work and entrepreneurship.

When you come up with an idea, people may think you’re crazy.  You may not want to hear what they are saying, but some naysayers could be identifying real problems. You have to learn to listen, be willing to change, reinvent, revise and dig deeply into your idea.  Without sustained passion, everything else fades away.  You don’t want to end up kicking yourself when someone else devises something similar because they persevered to that one small breakthrough that made it all worthwhile.

In the classic tale of Post-it Notes, Dr. Spence Silver at 3M unintentionally created weak glue, but he didn’t just throw it away.  He wondered what it might be good for, and kept that glue around, periodically asking friends and colleagues whether it could be useful.  Years later, his friend, Art Fry, imagined sticky paper for his music notations because his bookmarks kept falling out of the hymnal volumes, and Post-it Notes were born.



Putting Yourself in the Line of Fire

Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute concluded that what matters most for a city’s economic growth is attributable less to density than to how much residents come in contact with one another. You have to position yourself so you can listen to and learn from others.

It would pay to emulate how people in large cities connect by putting yourself in situations where you can mix with a variety of other people and share information and ideas. Hone your social media skills because passion alone is just not enough to be successful.  Spontaneous encounters that provide social and intellectual energy are especially helpful. There’s an added benefit: being skilled at social media and learning how to be an “influencer” will also help you get faster awareness of your business ideas once they come to market.  Whether you are inventing the next light bulb or trying to extend into new areas of distribution you’ll need passion, perseverance and persistence along with the opportunity to be in contact with other people. So get out there and mingle!

This post was written for and published on Chamber of Commerce. Jure Klepic was co-author of this post.